5th Year Adventures, Short Story 5, No Place to Run
by PTMaskell
Summary: A young wizard on the run from an unseen enemy reaches a line in the sand, takes some time to figure out his next move.


The air was cold high above the south-eastern European sky that morning. Tears blew straight off my eyes and fell through

the clouds beneath me to become the rain somewhere over the Balkans. Clinging tightly to the spines upon the back of my

Antipodean Opaleye dragon, I soundlessly wept for the loss of the world I was leaving behind, and the companion I'd lost

that morning.

Three weeks earlier I'd found myself possessing a lost wand. It had literally fallen from the sky, and when I'd realized

whom it belonged to I'd made haste to return to my lab to examine Headmistress McGonagall's wand. I'd barely begun to when

I was ambushed by an invisible attacker who blew up part of my lab. They'd vanished along with the wand before attacking a

second time. I fled the school minutes later. And I might have returned, had I not felt danger following me.

And whoever it was, had found me while I slept this morning. I awoke to their wand in my face, staring up their sleeve

into an invisiblity cloak. They were clever, and skilled. While trying to interrogate me about the wand they disarmed me

of my Aspen Dragon-Heartstring Wand bearing a werewolf tooth and Chimera Hair, Silencio'd me, and destroyed all my

Portkeys back home to Hogwarts.

The spell used to destroy all my briccks had awoken my dragon. She doused the building in flames, and my wand along with

it. I had only just managed to retreive my side-satchel from my unseen attacker before making our way winding out of

Europe to avoid capture or tracking. Now that I'd left my hometown, and I no longer had a wand to make use of, the

Ministry of Magic's Trace shouldn't be able to find me either.

My Opaleye was descending throught the clouds into the mountains below. I could sense a hunger building in us both. A

rider on a hungry dragon is just along for the ride at that point.

As we broke through the clouds, the ground was closer than one would expect, but Balkan's peaked well over two kilometers.

We landed softely. I attempted to call out to my Opaleye companion as she stormed off breathing an arc of fire at a pack

of wild, shaggy goats, but nothing came out. I was still silenced from this morning, despite the long flight from Normandy

to the Balkan mountains on the border of Europe and Serbia.

I set down my Undetectable Expansion charmed side-satchel and open it up. I'd no more hand my head stuck inside when a

flash of red and gleaming armour past my head and into the glittering feilds reminded me that Timothy, my pet squirrel in

his shining medieval armor had been hiding down there for weeks, even before the Snidget Reservation. My stocks of food

were huge, but he was probably bored of them, and the Fire Crabs in the Fire Cave were likely sick of his company too.

Glancing to the Fire Cave within the exceptionally large interior I frowned slightly, 'Or worse,' I thought. There was

something blocking the entrance, and the room had cooled slightly.

Looking back downward, I grabbed ahold of the ladder and climbed down. The backup lab had seen better days. The desk

where I'd kept my portus-charmed bricks was a mess. That cloaked person hadn't been kind when rumaging around. He even

knocked my old cauldron onto the ground. Picking it up from where it fell, the handled busted off, and a large chunk

stayed in my hand whilst the remains fell, split asunder.

First my home, then my wand, now my cauldron. It was beginning to feel as if the world didn't want me to be a Wizard any

more. Everything that made me special was falling apart. Sure, I had backup cauldrons I'd collected over the years. Even

managed to make one out of cheese one time, but the only thing it was good for was nacho dip as it turned out.

Sighing silently, I made my way to the left side of the lab and opened up my cupboards. 'At least my potions were intact,'

I thought ruefully. Retreiving a vial filled with a yellowish ooze, I popped the cork and knocked back the fluid in one

gulp. The Volubilis potion felt as if it had stuck in my throat despite my other senses telling me it had in fact made it

to my stomach. The cooling sensation it left in my throat allowed the muscles to relax, and my vocal chords to once again

fall back into allignment.

Clearing my throat, I heard my voice come back instantly. The potion's longevity was unlikely to be a concern, considering

how long it had been since I'd been hit with the spell early that morning and dusk was nearing. In cases when Volubilis is

applied directly after the charm had been applied, the effect were often temporarily, unless of course, the potion was

exceptionally well made. And took no pride in striving for perfection in my potion making.

I heard a scramble by the satchel entrance. Glancing upward I saw Timothy wrestling a long-thick stick from the nearby

thicket of silvery-green trees. He looked like a dog on a YouTube video trying to wrestle his toy into the narrow doorway,

sideways. I chuckled a little at the sight, and Timothy stopped, dropped the stick, which actually actually was what it

needed, and it fell straight to the floor. Timothy glared at me, and chittered indignantly, almost richeously. He lept

down the ladder, grabbed his prize, and dragged it up to his secondary perch on an ingredients shelf. The stick was so big

it stretched the length of the shelf, but I wasn't going to take it from him. We'd lost too much lately.

I had too much on my mind. Too much to deal with. Any good Slytherin (or Hufflepuff for that matter) could tell you just

what you needed to do when stress was building up: grab a snack, and let it go.

I gathered up a small meal of dried meats, some cheese, and a bottled drink I would have to resort to using in leui of

being able to cast Aguamenti. Grabbing a map from between two books, I decided to get my bearings, and maybe do some

planning while I ate. Clenching the map in my teeth, I stowed my food in my pockets and made my way out of the satchel,

and back into the field. Poking my head out I saw my Opaleye companion had captured about thirty of the wild goats, and a

donkey, broken them in its jaws, and piled them all about ten meters from where we'd landed and I was currently climbing

out of.

I hadn't spotted the Antipodean dragon until a shriek of a roar followed by a massive descending wall of flame enveloped

the pile of broken mammals cooking them up, some of them alive. She landed at the foot of the flames and dove her face in,

snapping off large hunk of mixed meats and swallowing loudly. Looking over in my general direction, I heard her in the

back of my mindscape, she was wondering if I was going to have some.

"You enjoy your meal, my beauty! I've got food!" I shouted happily to my friend. You had to mean every word when you were

mentally linked to someone, they could tell when you weren't being honest. She could tell I wasn't happy with the food I

had, but my happiness was going to be limited until I had a few things sorted out anyway. She went back to her meal, but I

could tell she was going to offer me some well-cooked haunch later on unless I made my hunger pangs vanish quickly.

Unfolding the map, I set about eating my dry meal. A blinking red light over modern day Turkey on the border of Romania

indicated where we were. The map was one of my many experiments over the years. It was rudimentary, but I hadn't the

passion to make anything more complex. I spent my time in my potions lab, or outside gathering ingredients, or

inexplicably surrounded by prophecy orbs that went on and on about cookies.

With neither the school, nor my home with the Trace there, I didn't actually know of any other place I could go and be

safe. All the other schools would likely be looking out for me, not that I knew where to find Durmstrang anyway.

I felt a scurrying along my leg and up to my shoulder. An inquisitive chittering toward the map made me sigh. He has just

s much of an idea about what to do based on a map as I did. I felt him scramble to the top of my head, his tail wrapped

lightly around my neck. His paws gripped my head by the temples.

"líta Norðri," came a bold voice into my mind.

Blinking slightly, I found myself somewhat broken. Whatever language that was, it was clearly a dead tongue as I,

European, had no knowledge of such a tongue.

"Look North," it came again, this time I understood it.

Blinking slightly, a slight shift of clouds in the far north of Greendland shifted a vision. A tree growing above the

clouds, vanishing into the light. Then gone again. The map faded back to its normal yellowish hues, but a new drawing of a

tree had appeared.

Timothy had gone to my shoulder again. Picking up the map, I turned to him with an eyebrow cocked.

WHAM! A roasted goat leg landed right where the map had been a moment earlier. Startled, I looked just up and saw the

motherly look of annoyed concern on my Opaleye's face. I hadn't been eating enough. But now I knew where I was going. It was time to stop

focusing on what I'd lost, and start looking at what I still had: a loving dragon, a wiley squirrel of apparently ancient Norse origin, and my

determination.


End file.
